These are just five more Power BI tips and tricks that I think everyone should know in order to get the most out of Power BI and produce better, more useful, and more powerful Power BI reports for their users. So without further ado, here are five more Power BI tips in no particular order. Enjoy!

Like this:

This week I was working on a project for a school up North. This customer wanted to use Power BI and map visualizations to view the locations of the various school buildings in the district. The problem for this very large school district was that they were missing the street address information for some of the buildings and for other buildings they were missing the latitude and longitude.

The good news is that Power Query in Power BI is flexible enough for us to take advantage of the Bing Maps API so that we can lookup the missing pieces of information we need. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can use the Bing Maps API to look up an address based on a latitude and longitude or use a street address to find a latitude and longitude for the location. Continue reading Power BI and the Bing Maps API→

Thanks to the December 2015 update released for Power BI, we can now use R to visualize our data in Power BI! Make no mistake, this is huge news and in this blog post I want to walk you through how to use the new R Script Visualization in Power BI and get you started with using R to create your first visualizations.

Not only can we create and download custom visuals from PowerBI.com to extend the capabilities of Power BI, we can use R to create a ridiculous amount of powerful visualizations. If you can get the data into Power BI, you can use R to perform interesting statistical analysis and create some pretty cool, interactive visuals.

Like this:

A couple weeks ago in a recent update to Power BI, an enhancement was added to enable a drill-down action in Power BI. This has been something that customers have been clamoring for but now its finally here!

After a couple months of fun with Power BI, I’ve picked up a few little tricks along the way that have helped me to be able to create some pretty cool data visualizations and dashboard reports. Here are five Power BI tips and tricks that you may find useful as you begin creating dashboards for your organization.

1) Use a pie chart or donut chart as a KPI

One of the ways we can create a KPI visualization is to use a pie or donut chart visualization, which you can see here.

In the chart above, I create a KPI to quickly display which tight ends score more than, less than or equal to the average number of touchdowns all tight ends scored last year allowing me to quickly identify tight ends that score more TDs than average.

Here is my calculated column to create the KPI value for you to have as an example:

You can use the matrix to display the names of the week below each day in the calendar and then also optionally display the totals by day.

5) Right align the y-axis on a bar chart to prevent the labels from hiding

The bar chart is a great visualization type to use in your Power BI dashboard because its so easy to differentiate the differences between the categories. But one of the problems with the visualization in Power BI is that sometimes its hard to see the categories on the y-axis if the chart is too small. See the image below to see an example the issue I’m talking about.

One way you can work around this is to right-align the y-axis. This will cause the full value of the y-axis categories to always be displayed in all their glory albeit on the right side.

You just have to live with the category labels on the right side of the bar chart.

The Scatter Chart in Power BI and Excel is very useful chart for visualizing three different metrics in tandem. But with a little bit of work you can use a Scatter Chart to create a Calendar chart for visualizing your metrics across the days of an individual month.